Magyar News, 2001. szeptember-2002. augusztus (12. évfolyam, 1-12. szám)
2002-05-01 / 9. szám
ANNE APPLEBAUM Hungary's 'House of Terror' Hungarian left in condemning the museum and organizing protests against it, largely on the grounds that it brings back aspects of the past that are better forgotten. The party's apparatchiks don't like the museum's photographs of former secret policemen -- in some cases, their relatives or parents. They don't like the association of communist and fascist terror, The inner court with the tank and pictures of the many victims on the walls A new museum was built. An opening ceremony was held. The prime minister made a speech to mark the occasion. That was all that happened on a Sunday in Budapest. Why, then, did the event draw a crowd of tens of thousands? Why were there demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, press conferences and opposing press conferences, furious editorials and angry condemnations? Why did the scene feature on the front pages of the Hungarian press the following morning? The answer lies in the nature of the Terror Háza or "House of Terror," the first museum of its kind to be opened anywhere in former communist Europe. A oncegrand building on Andrassy Avenue, one of Budapest's more splendid boulevards, the re-named "House of Terror" served from 1940 to 1945 as the headquarters of the Arrow Cross, the Hungarian Fascist movement. After Soviet troops marched into the city in the spring of 1945, the building was requisitioned by the communist Hungarian secret police, who used it as their headquarters until 1956. Both regimes used No. 60 Andrassy Avenue for interrogations and torture. Both locked up their enemies in its extensive cellars. Now, the museum housed there is dedicated to telling both phases of its history. In the entry hall, a visitor is immediately confronted with two panels of stone, one topped by the red star of the Communists, the other by the black "Arrow Cross" of the Fascists. In the first exhibition gallery, a wall of television screens on one side of the room blares out fascist propaganda. Another wall of television screens on the other side of the room blasts communist propaganda. The effect is immediate and emotional, as it was intended to be, and the rest of the museum continues in the same vein. The walls of one room are completely covered by a collage of social-realist posters and photographs; in another, the floor shows a map of the Soviet Gulag, to which 700,000 Hungarian political prisoners and POWs were deported. There are instruments of torture once used in the building, and photographs of victims and of victimizers. In the basement, the prison cells have been restored to their original state. The museum is a place that will certainly intrigue young people — which is precisely what its opponents do not like. The former Hungarian Communist Party, the now-renamed Socialists, have led the and, indeed, don't like the word "terror" at all, with its connotations of real crimes and real guilt. The party's leader has already declared that if the Socialists come to power after next spring's general elections, the museum will be renamed the "House of Reconciliation" — anything to persuade the Hungarian public to forget, once again, the more graphic events of the century just ended. This would not be difficult. For without a public debate — without naming names, dates and places -- most people do indeed forget, very easily. Some have political reasons to forget: They prefer not to remind their constituents what they were doing "before." Others feel such intense embarrassment that they have suppressed any memory. Popular memory of those two decades, the 1940s and 1950s, has been sent to the collective subconscious before. Viktor Orbán, Hungary's prime minister, told me this week that growing up in Hungary in the 1970s, he learned nothing about Hungary's 1956 revolution, and the subsequent Soviet invasion. Years later those events were not discussed even within families. But memory matters. In this instance, the saying that those who do not know their history - however ugly — are condemned to repeat it reflects the truth. In Russia, for example, few remember that Stalin deported the entire Chechen nation -- men, women and children — from Chechnya to the wastes of Kazakhstan in the 1940s, hoping that they would all die in the process. As a result, few understand the origins of their country's current war in Chechnya, and few were bothered by the wave of anti-Chechen racism that has accompanied it. When the past is not confronted, it also creates popular cynicism about public institutions. Most people in Central and Eastern Europe now realize that the greatest economic and political beneficiaries of the last decade's transition have been leading members of the different communist parties. In most of these countries, former victims of terror scrape by on tiny pensions, while their former tormentors have retired to their villas by the sea. Justice has not triumphed. No wonder corruption is rampant and crime is rising. Millions of people have been taught the lesson that morality doesn't pay. The potential for future distortions is even worse. Over the last few weeks, the Hungarian opposition has accused the House of Terror's political backers of promoting nationalism. Yet ultimately ignorance about the past produces far worse, far more narrow-minded forms of nationalism. How easy it would be for Hungarians to wave away the last 50 years of history as something imposed by outsiders: Everything that went wrong was the fault of the Soviet Union, or of Nazi Germany. And today everything that goes wrong would be the fault of foreign investors, or the Russian mafia, or the European Union. But while it is true that Hungary's communism was forced upon it from the outside, and while it is equally true that the Arrow Cross regime was helped by the Nazis, Budapest's new museum also makes clear that Hungarians themselves did both systems' dirty work: The "victimizers" whose faces appear at the end of the exhibition have Hungarian names. This is why it matters that those names appear. It isn't nice, or comfortable, when heads of state and government bicker about the crimes of the past, just as it isn't nice to think of fascists and communists torturing people in the cellars of a nice building on a lovely street. But it happened, so we might as well know that it happened, and why. We found this article on the internet put on by somebody. We don i know where it came from. We thank the author and the publisher. The photo is from Budapest Sun Page 1
